day of stage.

As a friend of mine (in the DSA) put it, this is why you should never let the anarchists organize your protests. How cringe-fully pathetic. Unfortunately, this sort of thing only reinforces a common impression/caricature of "the Left" in this country. Ugh, sigh, wince....

As a FB friend described it, "Basically, it all boiled down to 'My anti-establishment lifestyle choices are better than your mainstream lifestyle choices.' Even anti-consumerism (at least as represented here) is a form of consumerism."

But I’ve always wondered this: How hypocritical is it to wear a plastic toy, designed and licensed by the Warner Brothers corporation, and manufactured in a polluting slave-labor Chinese factory, to advertise a mainstream Hollywood film, starring overpaid actors, the profits from which will go to corporate shareholders, and yet you think that by doing this you’re somehow anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian?

Concerning the kids in Wobblies gear -

Other lefty fads popular this month in San Francisco, for all you trend-watchers: Adolescent middle-class anarchists who have never labored a day in their lives sporting “IWW” badges as if they even qualified as “workers” at all, much less “industrial workers.” What would a real Wobbly from the early 20th century think of these softies?

5 comments:

Meh, I could do without the right-wing running commentary. Don't get me wrong, I have been to PLENTY of events just like this, and know the look of the Food Not Bombs people eating bagels they salvaged out of a dumpster. (I have to admit, I once took one because I was hungry). Or the kids who liked to bang on stuff at demonstrations because they were angry that daddy didn't buy them a Beamer for their 16th birthday. Yeah, yeah, I know these people. They're fun to make fun of, and so on.

I just get tired of the right then pointing at them and saying: "See, you leftists are a bunch of elitists". Seriously, I would tell them to go fuck themselves with bells on. So you get a hard-on since Joe the worker somehow thinks that the government is taking too much of his money (it is, I don't disagree with that), the immigrants are taking his jobs, the homos are trying to make sodomy mandatory, etc? If they really wanted to defend the ordinary fellow from liberal tyranny, they would create a social order that doesn't rob him blind. It's fun to mock the anarchists (one Trotskyist I was listening to on the Internet called anarchists, "liberals with bombs", only here they are liberals who are pretending they have bombs), I don't think the exercise very productive. And why not show all of the bizarre shit at Tea Party rallies, if we are going to show the crazies?

EP, I personally didn't find the running commentary particularly "right wing"; indeed, with only one or two totally minor exceptions, the entire text could have come from a left winger fed up with self-defeating and impotent theatrics.

One of the things I thought after seeing these photos is that they are not nearly as funny or as disturbing as the videos and photos coming out of the tea party rallies.

And yeah, whilst I was glad to see the images here if, for nothing else, they provoked a lot of "how not to conduct a rally/protest" talk among more carefully minded leftists yesterday, there are times when one is inclined to, as it were, kill the messenger.

[cough] The Far Left has been just this silly for eons. All the New England Resistance / SDS folks I hung out with back in the day were from very affluent backgrounds -- far more affluent than mine, that's for sure. If they hadn't had daddy's money to put them through elite universities and get them started in life, would they have been able to afford those outrageous Boston rents even though they had no visible means of support? Ack, don't get me started.

But OK...switching gears now: Speaking of rage (or something): More and more these days, I wonder whether corporate employees are about ready to explode. At least our blue-collar counterparts get to go home and relax over a beer at the end of the day. But white-collar employees are being pushed, pushed, pushed 24/7 -- and, with email and cell phones, we're NEVER off the job. For many people, the stress has reached health-threatening levels. Plus, there's been a huge increase in workplace bullying: People fear for their jobs, so managers know they can get away with just about anything. At the same time, corporations are promoting into upper management the smarmiest, meanest, jerkiest, narcissistic egomaniacal bullies out there. Don't ask me why, but it seems to be a very real phenomenon; more and more articles are cropping up commenting on it. This type of manager is really bad for the company in the long run, but he/she gets ahead in the short run, because he/she is such an effective BS artist, I guess. Meanwhile, these bullies are stressing employees out so badly that there have been suicides as a result...I kid you not.